At 140 pages, and taking up over 7 Mb it’s a biggish download, so for brevity on this occasion, I’ll focus upon the sixth chapter on the topic of “Measuring e-government”.

Interestingly, amongst the draft indicators on page 94 is one labelled EG18 entitled “Degree of satisfaction of e-government service users, disaggregated by gender”, this is obviously in response to the statement on the same page that “Little information is yet available on the demand side of e-government.”

Similarly on page 96 is the phrase “Future work on measuring e-government capacity might usefully expand beyond ICT infrastructure and human resource issues to cover, where feasible, adherence to recommended practice in design of institutional machinery laws, regulations, policies and standards.” Which may help iron out the gender and access issues already raised elsewhere.

Further, confirming my own research, on page 97 it states that “usage of e-government services by citizens is absent from most measurement frameworks.”

The report also considers that demand might be captured by “measuring the percent of requests processed using ICT as a function of the overall number of requests”, along with “the degree of satisfaction of e-government service users.” Whilst I personally would use these measures across all channels to gain panoptical view of service as a whole.

It’s becoming clear that the lack of metrics has finally hit home, particularly ones focused upon outcomes. But, why-oh-why, must we always try to make them as complicated as possible?

Earlier posts

Earlier posts

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 2,011 other followers

About me

The blogger is Mick Phythian, a Research Associate at De Montfort University in Leicester, U.K. and former ICT Manager at Ryedale District Council in North Yorkshire, England. He was also a founder member of the Local CIO Council and regional Chair of Socitm.

Any opinions expressed on this weblog are purely those of the author.

He is not the Great Emancipator! The Great Emancipator was President Abraham Lincoln. The blog is so-called because some people perceive e-government, transformational government or, heaven forbid, government to be the emancipator of us all...